CourseWiz

Inspiration

Planning courses for coming years has always been a struggle. It is often difficult to see how academics and recreational activities should be balanced.

What it does

CourseWiz collects data about all TJHSST courses on a back-end mySQL database. Each record consists of the course name, ID, field of study, grade level, and any prerequisites. On the front end, users can input the previous courses they have taken, what their interests are, and what they plan for the future. The data is compiled and compared to the database using PHP. It then develops a four-year plan depending on what was chosen.

How we built it

All the courses were built into the mySQL database. Each database is queried using PHP and compared to the data inputted on the front-end. The website is hosted by TJ's Director program and was built using HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, and BootStrap.

Challenges we ran into

Initially, we were planning to build this program using a java applet and integrating that with an HTML webpage. However, after realizing that integrating java into HTML would be extremely difficult we decided to build a java web application using Heroku. Unfortunately, heroku was very difficult to set up and was a paid service. However, visiting the heroku website provided us with the idea of using the mySQL database. Using the database was not really simple, either. But it was easier to research solutions to problems we encountered while constructing the database. Integrating PHP was extremely difficult because it was very dated.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

Creating the SQL database was very exciting because many functions for mySQL online were not compatible with our version of mySQL. Another aspect we are proud of is the integration of our local HTML and CSS scripts into TJHSST's Director. Finally, getting PHP to finally output database queries was a big success as well.

What we learned

We learned extensive HTML and CSS techniques in addition to mySQL commands. PHP is a very old language and using it was a large struggle. But we were able to learn few commands in PHP as well

What's next for CourseWiz

We hope to further implement our evaluation service by integrating more modern languages, such as Django or Node.JS. We also hope to integrate the FCPS family connection application, because many course submissions occur through that application.Furthermore, we hope to expand to mobile services and eventually encompass more schools' curriculums
Link:
coursewiz.sites.tjhsst.edu